Tales of Zestiria Is Frame Locked@30 On PC & PlayStation 4

Bandai Namco’s Tales of Zestiria will launch about a month from now, on October 20, for PC, PlayStation 3 & PlayStation 4.

The publisher provided some technical details today, and there are good news and bad news. The bad news is that all versions, including PC and PlayStation 4, will be locked at 30FPS. Here’s how they justified it:

It’s now time to talk about the framerate; all versions of Tales of Zestiria will run at a constant 30 frames per second. Before you run off to the comment section, hear us out! The Tales of battle system has always been an integral part of the gameplay experience, and changing the framerate proved to have profound consequences on things like: animation, balance, difficulty, and overall fighting mechanics tuning. We do this in the best interest for the players’ experience!

While it is true that a JRPG like Tales of Zestiria won’t be ruined by 30FPS like a shooter or racing game, there’s no reason for developers to tie game logic to frame rate anymore. It’s especially unacceptable on PC, with more and more hardcore gamers owning 120/144Hz monitor; being limited to 30FPS is inevitably a huge disappointment for them.

The good news is that both the PC & PlayStation 4 versions will feature graphics enhancements over the PS3 version, including 1080P resolution for PS4 and up to 4K for PC.

Both the PC and PS4 version will run at a 1920×1080 resolution with PC supporting resolutions up to 4K. Full HD here we come! They also benefit from many other graphical improvements: the draw distance is 2x times what it is on PS3, with the PC version having a “far” option improving it even more. Shadows, anti-aliasing and textures also got upgraded. The PC version will allow you to switch between low, medium and high for all the preceding options.

If you want to take an even closer look to the PC version of Tales of Zestiria, tune here at 6PM UK time on September 24 to take a look. Otherwise, just wait for our review which should be available near the release date.